Among Strange Victims (42 page)

The atmosphere in Jimmie's studio was so insalubrious that Professor Velásquez dissolved into a
trompe-l'oeil
worthy of David Copperfield. Only when he spoke—“How are things going with the editing of that phantom book?”—and rounded off his witticism with a wheezing laugh, did Rodrigo become aware of his presence, forgotten in one of the three Acapulco chairs delimiting the borders of the living room.

Although Marcelo had not yet arrived, Professor Velásquez was undiplomatic enough to tell Rodrigo that his place was on the floor, as there were only three chairs, and in that house, decisions were made by the “council of wise old men.” The allusion to this fictitious authority could only be irritating. Rodrigo was obviously younger than the other three men—the gringo, Velásquez, and Marcelo—and was closer in age to Micaela, even though she was a decade younger than him. The fact that these gentlemen were involved in so eccentric an undertaking as deciphering the future form of art by means of hypnosis seemed to be aggravated by their show of insensitivity to two youths—though of very different caliber—like Rodrigo and
Micaela. There was, in Velásquez's reference to the “council of wise old men,” not only a touch of rancor directed at their youth, obliging them to sit on the floor, but also a thinly disguised sense of inferiority. Velásquez, fatty Velásquez, whose cranial terrain was divided between areas of baldness and dandruff; Velásquez, the survivor of three divorces, the anonymous professor who years before had lost the ability to win over his students by any other means than blackmail; Velásquez, the brute, the man who had early on become fascinated by aesthetics—the aesthetics of the avant-garde—and had clung to it, disguising his interest as intellectual research, as if it were the last trace of his youth; that Velásquez had found, in the hypnosis project, the enthusiasm he needed to channel his eighth adult crisis into the sense of power he longed for.

Marcelo Valente's reasons for embarking on such an unlikely enterprise couldn't be very different. They were both men who, after a couple of decades given up to teaching, needed a new relationship with the world, a mirage of youth and delirium that would quash their dissatisfactions while erectile dysfunction was gaining ground and stripping them once and for all of their thirst for History—it is well known that History is a phallic aspiration denied to eunuchs, one that women access in a completely different, much more intellectual and tempered way, while men beat totemic drums around it.

For his part, Rodrigo's motivation was clearer. He couldn't give a damn about the future of art, the sense of power that hypnotizing others might bring him; he didn't need any other emotion than that provided by his long conversations with Marcelo in the house in Puerta del Aire, with the addition of an occasional altercation with his mother and the customary coitus with Cecilia on his return to Mexico City. He didn't particularly need to feel more alive or to gain a timely victory in an idiotic battle that is always lost before it begins. No. What Rodrigo wanted, for the moment, was to go on smelling Micaela for a little longer. And to gather sufficient sensual material to allow him to dream about her later. What Rodrigo needed were reasons to have regrets when he reached a half century and, looking back, say in a tone of moral sententiousness, “I should have . . .” He needed to be wrong; in short, to stumble and doubt, and to be moved in some unique way by the sense that the communion he
had searched so hard for was there, with its legs crossed on the straw mat beside him. Rodrigo didn't need to feel alive, like other people: he needed to
be
alive.

He and Micaela made themselves as comfortable as possible on the matting, and a slight touching of hands as she maneuvered to make space for him revealed a skin whose softness was only eclipsed by the warmth it radiated. Rodrigo even thought the woman—it was an exaggeration to so describe her—might have a fever, so scorching was his perception of the contact.

Jimmie, as usual, immediately monopolized the conversation. Just as soon as he had handed out the cans of beer—he gave Micaela a glass of water—he sat in one of the three chairs—the other, like an invitation or an offence remained empty—and once again embarked on the tale of his discovery of hypnosis and his later work. Rodrigo had heard the story secondhand, by way of Marcelo's measured narrative, and had not imagined it could be as complicated as it actually was. Jimmie changed the details with each new version, and now he made it sound as if he had always, from the first moment, despised Dr. Mind and planned his stealthy betrayal. The digressions were also different from those he had embarked on when telling the story to Marcelo. On this occasion, he said almost nothing about the
CIA
experiments and instead spoke at length, without respite, about his time as an illegal herbalist in the late eighties.

Rodrigo listened patiently, considering whether he should say he had already heard the story from Marcelo. He felt sorry for Micaela, who must have listened to all those innocuous details of the gringo's drifting pilgrimage three hundred times. Velásquez, who in Jimmie's presence became, if possible, a little more opaque, vegetated in his chair as if that string of nonsense were a cradlesong lulling a child. Rodrigo's legs went to sleep. He wasn't used to sitting on the floor—a level that, in his view, was more appropriate for animals—but accepted the sacrifice because Micaela's scent, a mixture of incense and vanilla with something more unsettling, came to him like a perfect symphony.

Jimmie rattled out his anecdote for a while longer. As he was moving toward the finale, there was a knock, and Velásquez made the superhuman effort of detaching himself from his chair to open
the door to Marcelo, who delayed his greetings and stood by his chair so as not to interrupt the gringo's monologue. Finally, Jimmie came to the end his story. Marcelo greeted, in this order, Rodrigo, Micaela, and the gringo—he had already absentmindedly clasped hands with Velásquez—and Micaela stood up—an eddy of more potent smells around Rodrigo, who followed her with his eyes—to attend to the visitors and fetch drinks, as was dictated by the rigorous patriarchy in which they lived.

It's unimportant to mention how much they drank. Suffice it to say that tequila, once again, was the liquor selected to prepare for the coming ritual. Rather than hypnosis, they spoke of everyday matters for a few hours until a chance silence fell on the room, and Jimmie took advantage of it to ask, in a commanding tone, if they should begin. Velásquez was the only one to give a clear answer, in the affirmative, while Marcelo and Rodrigo nodded rather unconvincingly, and Micaela remained, as ever, silent.

9

It's hard to say if the following morning's hangover was the result of the hypnosis, the tequila, the imbibing of adolescent urine, or all of the above. To tell the truth, he had, up until the last minute, been fairly skeptical about the real possibilities of the project. He didn't believe hypnosis was substantially different from, for example, the sleep that followed a bad migraine. He imagined it as a certain misting of consciousness and, at best, an exacerbated imaginary state directed by the words of an invisible guru. But the technique stolen from E-Sight Enterprises was much more complex; in this version, the process for attaining a hypnotic state seemed more like a satanic ritual than guided meditation.

First, as a warm-up, they drank Micaela's urine. Rodrigo observed with a fascination bordering on psychosis how the beautiful girl pulled up her dress in front of them and moved a wide-lipped glass to her vagina, the humid, rosy lips of which he thought he glimpsed
for a brief moment. Desire then installed itself throughout his whole body. He wanted to believe that sooner or later he would manage to eat that cunt, slowly, for hours, but there was no element of reason he could cling to in order to imagine this would happen. Luckily, the taste of the urine dissipated those turbid thoughts. It was, without a doubt, an unexpected sensorial experience; the initial disgust at the smell rapidly gave way to an eagerness to down the drink in one gulp and, afterwards, a sensation of heat down the length of his throat. It tasted like an exotic cocktail, a kind of dirty martini with some top-secret ingredient that made the drink burn.

After that, Jimmie ordered them to perform a strange series of vaguely military exercises. With exaggerated effort, Marcelo and Velásquez copied the movements the gringo carried out more flexibly, as if he were already used to them. Rodrigo and Micaela, in contrast, had little difficulty replicating the gringo's extremely strange routine. Once that stage was over, Jimmie handed each of them a different object. Objects dragged from the dusty corners of his studio but that, in the hands of those involved, seemed so special it was odd they had not been noticed earlier. Rodrigo, for example, received a small toy truck, made of plastic, with an impressive level of detail. In the driver's seat a man in a cap could be made out, brutally killed, his shirt stained with blood, his mouth covered with electrical tape. The cargo space could be opened by operating a tiny plastic lever, revealing its disturbing contents: a shipment of doll heads.

Rodrigo accepted his toy and the instruction to examine it carefully. He wondered about the origin of that strange but realistic national souvenir. It was like a narco version of a Playmobil; probably, thought Rodrigo, some artist had constructed the piece for counterpropaganda purposes. He noted that Micaela had also received an object alluding to violence: a tequila shot glass in the interior of which stood the translucent shape of an
AK
-47 rather than the obligatory cactus of the glasses normally found in airport stores.

The objects allotted to Velásquez, Marcelo, and Jimmie himself had no such reference. They were, respectively, a large marble of the variety known as “cloverleaf,” with twisted abstract figures in its interior, a carved stone scepter, and a pair of women's panties with
a floral print that Jimmie sniffed in an unpleasant way, and which Rodrigo thought might belong to Micaela.

Rodrigo's was, by far, the most complex and detailed object. It immediately made him think, by free association, of the super market bag he had discovered in the waste ground, what was now a long time ago. He remembered his repulsion, his gloomy suspicions about the origins of those viscera, his fear of seeing them again on his second, and last, incursion into the lot.